


Many that live deserve death

by TuskFM



Category: The Old Guard (Movie 2020)
Genre: Alcohol, Andy Centric, Angst, Animal Death, Character Study, F/F, Gen, Graphic Description, Heavy Angst, Mentioned Lykon - Freeform, Mentioned Quynh | Noriko, Minor Andy | Andromache of Scythia/Quynh | Noriko, Minor Joe | Yusuf Al-Kaysani/Nicky | Nicolò di Genova, POV Andy | Andromache of Scythia, Unhealthy Relationships, andy and booker building their friendship on trying to support each other misery and enabling it, minor as in referenced to in the past, sorta? it's not toxic but definitly bordering on unhealthy
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-02-16
Updated: 2021-02-16
Packaged: 2021-03-18 16:14:32
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,771
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29492655
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/TuskFM/pseuds/TuskFM
Summary: “It’s old. It has seen too much blood, too much death and sorrow, enough for three lifetimes. It has carried so much weight for so long, an endless journey with no goal, only wandering.” Her thumb rubs the arch of its eye and she sees the plea in the black of its pupils. “For such creature, death would be mercy.”~Andy is forced to deal with old demons and is confronted to the reality of her existence.
Relationships: Andy | Andromache of Scythia & Booker | Sebastien le Livre
Comments: 4
Kudos: 19





	Many that live deserve death

**Author's Note:**

> Thank you to the friends who helped me enabling my own angsty prompt, I love y’all.
> 
> Let me know if there's anything else that needs a TW.

He dreamed her.

Sébastien, the new one. He dreamed her. He dreamed about Quỳnh.

They found him a month ago, talked with him, welcomed him with them, explained as best as they could the immortality ordeal. Andrea pointedly ignored how relieved he looked when he heard about Lykon’s fate, they went to sleep. She stayed up late that night, wasn’t sure why she wasn’t able to close her eyes until she heard Sébastien’s breath quickening in his sleep.

He dreamed of her, she’s still alive, Quỳnh is still alive, she’s- She’s still trapped in her coffin of metal after two centuries, lost in the sea, she’s still alive, still dying, still dying over and over while she’s sitting with her family and Andrea felt her heart being ripped out of her chest when Sébastien described a woman with mad eyes banging against metal and screaming with fury.

It’s been a month now that she doesn’t sleep at night anymore. She keeps her eyes open long into the night for when Sébastien will inevitably wake with a scream, a cry or a growl, scramble to find his flask and meet Andrea’s eyes. They will stare at each other, then he will look down in shame and pity and drink enough to not dream anymore. She wonders how long he’ll wait to start drinking before sleeping. She wonders how long she’ll keep doing this before the pain in her chest becomes too much to conceal.

She knows what she’s doing, she knows why she’s doing it. Someone told her once that misery isn’t a good look on her, but it feels better to at least punish herself rather than pretend nothing’s happening. She can barely remember Quỳnh’s face. It’s been two century and Quỳnh feels like mist in her head, a mirage she cannot grasp for it will be gone forever, so she instead let it roam her consciousness. The more time passes the more her portraits Joseph sometimes shows her looks like a stranger, not the other half of her soul. She forgot what her laughter sounds like, she’s forgetting Quỳnh and everything they had together and she hates herself more than any of those Englishmen for this. It feels like killing her all over again, letting her be forgotten.

It feels like she’s losing herself along with Quỳnh’s memory.

*

They’ve been traveling for a week now, they left the warm coast and got horses to make their way to the inland of Europe where they are needed. Sébastien is following them, she doesn’t know if he’ll stick, if he’ll leave them soon to get back to his family or if he's accepted his fate yet. He doesn’t say a lot, as much as his mouth babble, and she isn’t sure how to read him yet.

It’s familiar, traveling by horse. Andrea knows how this goes, it’s soothing. She’s usually leading, the first to go but for once she doesn’t mind Joseph opening the march, this way she can keep an eye on the new one. He’s a quick learner, she’ll give him that, going from never touching a horse to riding one not as terrible as expected is good enough for her. And he’ll have time to learn anyway, she doesn’t worry about skills, those can be sharpened. It’s the heart and where it is that matters.

“Come Zephyr.” She hears Joseph click his tongue and his horse obediently follows his tug on the bridle and turns at the split in the road. Nicolas is behind him on his own horse, a brown stallion he calls Armino that he bought a year ago after the other had to be sold for supplies.

“Hey Andrea,” Sébastien calls where he’s riding in front of her. She presses her horse up to him so they can talk face to face and not shouting over their shoulders. Andrea’s own mount, a bastard of a horse with sturdy legs and a mind of its own, snorts and shakes its neck but allows the pace to quicken for a moment. Cranky old creature, it’s gotten too used to the apples Joseph constantly feed it.

“What do you need?” She says as her hands find their place on her saddle, barely holding the bridles. Her horse might be old and cranky but it’s far from stupid, it knows what it’s supposed to do.

“Why didn’t you name your horse?” He asks her and she’s not even surprised by that, though she wonders why he didn’t ask sooner.

“My horse?”

“Your horse. It doesn’t have a name. Joseph and Nicolas named theirs, it’s not a weird immortal thing. So why?” Ah yes, names. Naming things. Gaining ownership over them. He called the horse they bought him last week after his wife. A poor fucking idea when his mare will inevitably die but Nicolas told her not to comment on it so she didn’t. Although he said nothing about looks.

“A horse doesn’t need a name.” She settles for an explanation. “It helps you as it wishes and then it leaves you, it shouldn’t be bound to anyone or anything.”

“We’ve been trying to get her to name just one horse for centuries,” Nicolas says in front of them, the eavesdropping bastard. “Trust me, it’s a lost fight.” Sébastien nods and the silence stretches. She’s about to get back to her place when he opens his mouth again.

“Is that why you won’t tell me your real name? Because you don’t want to be bound to someone?”

“Ah!” She can’t help it, the laugh is out of her throat in a second, bitter and cold. She sees Joseph’s shoulders tensing, interest raising in him like every time the subject of age or name is brought up to her. Just as curious as Nicolas is noisy, the pair they make. “I fucking wish I could tell you Sébastien.” She calms down from her fit of laughter as he stares at her with owl’s eyes, comically wide and round like coins. “I forgot my name.” She tells him.

“What?”

“I forgot. Don’t remember it, it’s gone. It doesn’t exist anymore.” _The person I was doesn’t exist anymore_ she thinks for herself. Sébastien stares at her some more, and when it becomes obvious he won’t add anything else she pulls on the bridles of her horse and gets back to closing the march.

He doesn’t try to start a conversation with her again after that, he resolves himself to ask his questions to Joseph and Nicolas and she can’t find herself to care about it.

*

This particular exchange crawls back into her mind a week later, when she’s staring down at her dying horse.

They were attacked just as the sun rose over the horizon. It would have been a quick affair dealing with the bandits if it weren’t for the new member in their group. They kept trying to act as three when Sébastien inserted himself in the formation. They worked around it eventually, they are good warriors used to much worse conditions, and he did manage to find his place, staying back to end the ones slipping past them. But it hindered them enough to have casualties. Zephyr’s white coat is marred with blood, thankfully all superficial. Unlike her own horse.

“It’s a broken leg Jo’.” She says as she kneels next to it. “A horse with a broken leg won’t walk ever again, much less run. What is a horse that cannot run, uh? Tell me.” The bones of its back leg are shining under the sun, dark guts spilling out of its stomach onto the scarce grass. She’s not sure how it happened, or who did it, but it isn’t pretty. Its breath is whistling, panicked and Andrea lays a hand over its skull to calm it down, at least a little.

“What are you gonna do?” Sébastien asks and she doesn’t look up from the animal lying on the dry ground. What is she going to do? The horse is trying to neigh but it’s half a whine that comes out of its throat. Her hand feels frozen over its nose.

“Andrea?” Joseph calls her but she cannot look away from the horse’s eyes. She’s been riding with it for two decades now. It has walked out of battles it shouldn’t have, traveled around the world with her the way no horses has in a long, long time. She knows it well enough to need no bridles nor saddle to ride with it.

“It’s old.” She finds herself saying. She’s not sure why the words are spilling out of her throat like river falls do but she doesn’t have the heart to stop them, not this time. The fur under her hand is already growing cold. “It has seen too much blood, too much death and sorrow for one being alone, enough for three lifetimes. It has carried so much weight for so long, an endless journey with no goal, only wandering.” Her thumb rubs the arch of its eye and she sees the plea in the black of its pupils. “For such creature, death would be mercy.”

Her knife finds its place in her hand like air does in her lungs and she whispers a prayer to the horse’s ear. She’s not even sure what the words mean anymore, lost like so many other things are to her but she knows they honor the animal’s time spent on earth. She doesn’t believe in anything divine, not anymore but she still holds respect for those creatures, how could she not. They shouldn’t be bound to this earth for eternity. No one should.

Its death is quick, she aligns her knife to its artery at the junction of its jaw to its neck and with one swift movement sinks the blade to the hilt into the flesh. One breath leaves its nose and its bloody stomach stops moving altogether after a few seconds of struggle. It looks at her one last time as it lay its head down on the ground and stops fighting, pain forgotten now. She watches the flicker of life blick out of its gaze. It’s all mechanics when she pulls the blade out of her horse’s body, her mind feels stuck, unable to think clearly.

“ _Accept this mercy._ ” She murmurs in her own tongue, ancient and dead. With one hand she closes its vacant eyes and she wipes her blade on nearby grass. The silence is deafening when she looks up from her task.

Sébastien is looking at Joseph and Nicolas with furrowed eyebrows, questioning them with his eyes. But their gazes are focused on her and she sees pain in them, thankfully no pity, she wouldn’t stand it. It’s then that she realizes her words, what she just spoke aloud.

“I wasn’t talking about me.” She adds in a rush, cold tone but she doesn’t wait for an answer from them, none of them; doesn’t look at faces where she knows doubt and disbelief will be painted on. She stands up and turns her back, cowardly running away. Her heart feels too flayed at this instant to deal with anything.

The last thing she hears is Joseph’s voice. “Who is going to take the gears off of her?”

*

The moon is high in the sky, lighting the trees and bushes around the road with pale grey. They set camp in an old barn, its stone walls are breaking down and the hay still inside is half-eaten by rot and mice. Andrea can hear Jo’ and Nico inside, talking around the fire. Their voices are soothing, calm and constant, talking about all and nothing, mindless details of the day. She likes that, it reminds her of good days where they have nothing to worry about. They're speaking with their mix of dialects they use between each other which means Sébastien isn’t there with them. They’ve all been making an effort to use French near him, at least for the first couple of months until they all settle together.

Before she can wonder where he went, she gets her answer walking up to her, dark silhouette against the moonlight.

“Hey _patron_.” Sébastien says, and Andrea tilt her head at that. It’s been a while since she last spoke French, the language is fuzzy in her head.

“What did you call me?” She let the back of her head hit the brick wall she’s sitting against, properly looking at him and his disheveled hair. He’s holding a bottle in his hand and she's curious to know where he got it.

“ _Patron_ , you know. _Cap_ , _capolier_. Uh, boss.” And that make her smile, a little.

“That how you see me?” She asks him and he takes it as what she meant it to be; an invitation.

“Well, I mean.” And he sits down by her side. “The guys call you chief. You give the orders, they follow you.” He shrugs and looks straight ahead.

“So that’s what you do? You follow the heard?”

“Nah.” He shakes his head. “You’re the boss because you obviously know better. I don’t know how old you are, but it doesn’t take a genius to guess you are much, much older than Joseph and Nicolas, and the middle ages are pretty fucking old already in my book. I don’t know what you’ve seen, or what you’ve done, but it’s enough for you to know what you’re talking about. I call you boss because I think you’re the smartest of all of us and the least likely to get us into trouble.” She hums at that, weights his words. The implication carried within them.

“Are you saying you trust me Sébastien?” There’s a joke to be made there but her tone cannot carry any teasing, as much as she’s trying to. It falls flat and still Sébastien snorts.

“Let’s not get ahead of ourselves, eh? You still slit my throat and seem cool with a lot of shit that I’m not sure about. But-” And he shakes his head. “I’ve dreamed of you for a while, I’ve seen you in a lot of places, do a lot of things. I say it counts for something, no?”

“Mhh.” Andrea nods, unsure how to take his words. Instead, she lets her eyes wander to the landscape in front of her. There’s not much she can see with the size of the crescent moon in the sky but the rattling of the leaves by the summer soft breeze and the cicada’s songs are suggestive enough for her to settle down. She always felt better in the open, don’t think that’ll ever change despite humanity’s best try to settle into the sedentary lifestyle.

“Say, the dreams.” Sébastien’s voice picks up in the silence of the night, cutting her thoughts short. “Do they ever stop on their own?”

“Only when we meet.” There’s a long pause.

“I will never meet her, uh?” And his words feel like molten gold in her guts.

“I’ve spent decades looking for her, do you think I would have abandoned her if I could have gotten to her in any way?” And Sébastien recoils beside her and she realizes anger slipped in her voice, how her shaking hands curled into tight fists. She squeezes her eyes shut and tries to breathe through the harrowing pain.

“She’s not just a soldier, right.” He’s not even asking a question, and it hurts so much.

“What do you want Sébastien.” She cuts him off before he can say any more words that’ll twist the knife in her chest.

“Here,” and he hands her his bottle, which smells like cheap whiskey. “The strong stuff helps.” Her fingers close around the neck of the bottle and she inspects the labels. Written by hand, certainly a smuggled bottle from a clandestine distillery.

“Why,” She asks before taking a swig. It is cheap stuff; it burns her throat and warms her stomach like nothing else could. She takes a second one before handing the bottle back. She let herself feels the grounding reality of alcohol in her body, anything to distract her traitorous mind.

“I don’t know.”

“I think you do. You just don’t want to say.” He snorts at that and drinks a good amount of whiskey himself. “Not that I hold it against you. Sometimes it’s better to keep it shut.” Sébastien turns his eyes toward her and inspects her own face like she did with his bottle moments ago. He’s sharp, as inexperienced and gauche as he is. He has a sharp mind behind the weary face, it shows in the way his eyes shine and move. He seems to come to a conclusion because an impish grin creeps on his lips.

“Will you punch me if I said you seem as miserable as I feel?” To his credits, it does make her laugh, the unexpected nature of his question; albeit it translates only in a half-aborted chuckle and curled lips. She shrugs and grabs the bottle from his hands before answering.

“You’re not miserable as I am.” She takes a swig, enjoys the taste of cheap alcohol as best as one can. “But it’s fair.”

They pass the bottle back and forth. She doesn’t count time but it’s enough for Joseph and Nicolas to quiet down inside the barn and for her back to grow stiff against the wall behind her. They don’t talk, not really. They exchange a few words but Andrea is happy to sit there with someone by her side who won’t ask questions or look at her with worry. Sébastien has no tact but he knows when to keep his mouth shut, which she appreciates these days.

He doesn’t mention her horse, she doesn’t mention his. And yet, there’s an understanding growing between them. Understanding that he named his mare like that for the same reason Andrea refuses to sleep in another room and stays up late. You cannot replace love but still, it feels better to try to keep it rather than let it die, and pain is the closest thing that comes to the intensity of loving someone like they’re part of your very own soul.

“Hey boss,” Sébastien says, gaze lost in the trees. “What’s the worst about this whole immortality thing?”

“You asked Joseph and Nicolas yet?”

“No,” his lips twist. “I don’t want to drag them down. They seem so…”

“Happy?” She offers. Some day their smiles are a beacon of light, others it feels too much to even look at them.

“I don’t know. I wouldn’t say happy. But at peace.”

“Mhh. That’s one way to put it.” Sharp eyes when he doesn’t drown them. “You can ask them; they have thought about this a lot. Maybe it would cheer you up to hear their conclusions.”

“Maybe. But I don’t want to be cheered up.” That was unexpected, and therefore push a laugh out of Andrea.

“Ah, a man who knows what he wants!” She elbows him and grabs the bottle from his hands. “I can agree with you on this. Some days you don’t want to see the end of the storm, you want to get lost in its violence.”

“Yeah,” Sébastien says by her side but his gaze is full of expectation on her. The laugh is out of her as quick as it came.

“You want to know what’s the worst thing about being unable to stay dead? Let me tell you. You forget. Soon, you’ll forget your wife’s face, what her laugh sounds like and how happy it made you. You’ll forget your first home, your friends and your life there. It’ll all seems like a strange dream when you think about it. Something that isn’t true, hasn’t been true in a long time even though you were there when it happened. We all forget; we who were given so many years simply have more to forget.” She hands him the bottle but he doesn’t take it, no he’s listening. She leans closer and lowers her tone, keeps the bitterness out of her voice for once, allows the sorrow to seeps through thanks to the alcohol in her body.

“But forgetting, this isn’t the worst no. The worst is what you remember. What your feeble, traitorous memory leaves you with.” She doesn’t know what Lykon’s smile looked like anymore. She forgot the sound of his laughter and poetry. The only thing she remembers about him, clear as a stream’s water, is the warmth of his blood on her hands and the way he looked at her on his final breath, how relieved he seemed at the idea of joining his ancestors in the afterlife; and how underneath the panic and incomprehension, all Andrea’s mind could whisper to her was “ _why him and not you_ ”. That moment is etched into her memory like rivers tear canyons in the earth, the shame and anger and grief she felt in his last breath will never leave her.

She wishes she had a different picture of Quỳnh than the way she screamed her name when they locked her in her prison, the burning pain on her wrists and how her throat tore itself with her screams, how her last memory of Quỳnh is tainted with her own selfish guilt and rage. No portrait of her can erase the rictus of panic now forever etched in Quỳnh’s memory.

The tears are unexpected on her face, scorching and shameful. She wipes them with the back of her hand and squeezes the bottle in her palm, shake herself out of the maze that is her mind. Sébastien has the decency to conceal his own emotions when she looks at him, lets herself feel it all for the first time in ages.

“Just you wait and you’ll see. Soon, you’ll be begging to forget everything you still have in your head.”

She blinks away the tears in her eyes and bites her tongue, feeling she has said too much. She thinks of her horse, the feeling of its hair under her palm, the way it looked at her in its last moments. She wonders what picture she must make right now, how similar hers and the horse's eyes are.

The last coherent thought she has that evening is how Quỳnh would still remember her first name if she were there. She was the only one she told it to, the only one to remember it. Each day she feels she's slipping further away from herself, like grains of sand running through her fingers and she cannot find a single good reason to close her fist and keep the sand from disappearing.

**Author's Note:**

> Is there a deeper symbolism in Andy killing a horse, an animal extremely linked to Scythian civilization and one I’ve come to heavily associate with Andy herself, while she’s mourning her own life? Who knows.
> 
> I'm on tumblr @salzundhonig.
> 
> Kudos and comments appreciated.


End file.
